I was noticing in the recent review of J W Dant that the reviewer (TNbourbon) had seen J W Dant from Lawrenceburg, Ind. and suggested that maybe it was Seagrm whiskey. Schenley had a distillery there as well the Dant would be from their plant. I thought that I would take the time here to copy the timeline I did while at United Distillers for Schenley so that people would have a better idea as to the scope of their business and history.

Schenley History

1807 - Dunn and Ludlow build a distillery at the confluence of Tanners Creek and the Ohio River in Indiana (UD Archives, 991.m.142).

o - Article on the Green River display at Louisiana Purchase Exposition, in St. Louis. Display was simply a plain glass case with hundreds of bottles in it, left unattended. Green River won a Grand Prize (Wine and Spirit Bulletin, Jan 12, 1905, page 35).(Copy of the award on page 99).

o - Green River advertisement on page 72 and an article about J W McCulloch's Green River Distillery's 25th aniversary on page 47. McCulloch started off as an agent for the Internal Revenue Department (Wine and Spirit Bulletin, Nov.1, 1912).

1913 - Both W.P. and G.W. Squibb die leaving the distillery to their seven sons and cousins (UD Archives, 991.m.142).

1914 - Four sons and one cousin of W.P.Squibb incorporate and build a new distillery on the same sight (UD Archives, 991.m.142).

o - The Buffalo Springs Distillery is rebuilt by James B. O'Rear with a capacity of 160 barrels a day and was one of the first distilleries to use air conditioning in its distillery to allow distillation during the heat of the summer (U. D. Archive, Buffalo Springs History file).

1934 - A fire burns a warehouse with 18,000 barrels at the
James E Pepper distillery in Lexington. (UD Archives,
(992.m.164).

1943 - Roma Wines becomes affiliated with Schenley. (UD
Archives, 991.m.145). NOTE: Roma Wines is known for
sponsoring radio dramas such as Suspence Theater
during the war. The most famous was Agnes Morehead
in "Sorry, Wrong Number".

o - First commercial shipment of penicillin made from the
Lawrenceburg, Ind. plant. (UD Archives, 992.m.164).

o - Dorothy H Rosenstiel dies (Life, July 21, 1966).

o - William F Tigh is made the first president of Canadian Schenley LTD.(U D Archives, unpublished Manuscript, p.239).

1945 - The United States government has restricted the
distilling industry to just 95 days of commercial
production andrestricts the types, grades and
quantities of grains used. (UD Archives, 992.m.164).

o - The distillery in Pheonix, Arizona burns down on May 22, 1945. The plant was covered by insurance, but may be rebuilt elsewhere (U D Archives, Uncataloged Manuscript).

1946 - Schenley signs an agreement with the Kahlua Co. in Mexico and become the sole importer of this product as well as running a distillery in Mexico City under Schenley de Mexico (1946 Schenley Annual Report).

o - Schenley builds the Tormore Distillery in Speyside, Scotland. It is the first new distillery in Scotland in the 20th century and the first distillery ever built with American capitol (Life, July 21, 1966).

Terrific timeline. I have at hand the original documents conveying the New England Distillery from Mrs. Nellie Jacob to my grandfather H.E. Pogue and Herbert Hoffheimer. Mr. Hoffheimer was my a law partner to my two great uncles, John F. Pogue and Province Pogue, in Cincinnati. The date is November 30, 1925. The purchase price was $37,500 which included the distillery and all inventoried product. If you'd like a copy let me know I'd be glad to send one.

OhmahGAWD! That's an incredible timeline. Thank you SO much for posting that. Here's a photo to enhance the experience. I swiped this off of an EBay auction (the auction's still open until the 26th if anyone wants to bid on the bottle). There's more photos on the page. Item# is 6195049744.

Just happened across an old pint of Deluxe Old Quaker Bourbon and was pleased to be able to place it thanks to this historical thread.

It was bottled by "Old Quaker Distilling Frankfort KY, Lawrenceburg IN, and Fresno, CA". 80 proof, 4 yrs. old. It bears the legend "Old Quaker is in tune with today's growing preference for mildness and mellowness. You don't have to be rich to enjoy rich whiskey." Truer words were never spoken.

Has anyone sampled this? I can't wait to see what this olde tyme whiskey tastes like.

-Mike

"There exist mighty dogs, the dangerous kind who take hold of your heart and do not let go."

I visited Ekron yesterday and found this information after talking with Bob Chism, the local historian.

J.A. Berry owned the distillery at Ekron. Started operations in 1883. His residence was at Cloverport, KY. He commuted daily by train (L & N) to the distillery. Was Pebbleford the name from the first owner?

In the beginning they made brandy. The local farmers would sell there apples, pears, and peaches to that industry.

There are no limestone springs in that area. Water was pumped in from Doe Run Spring or Doe Run Inn. If I'm not mistaken that spring is actually Otter Creek. The water was piped 7 or 8 miles. The detail from Bob Chism were sketchy.

I have an arial picture of the place in its better days. The photograph was from Schenley Tim LaFonders. Schenley bought the distillery for the sole purpose of shutting it down, or so says Bob Chism.

Your probably aware Derby Tank Car Company had an operation there from 1952-1974? They cleaned railroad tank cars that carried hazardous materials. Paul LaVertue owned DTCC. The EPA shut the operation down and now monitors the entire site. DTCC buried railroad equipment on the site. Its a sad site to see.

My question. How did it go from producing rum to producing bourbon?
Any label names from the rum production era? Bob Chism ONLY mentioned Poindexter. You had mentioned two others Berry and Bell of Franklin.

Philip Stave

Attachments

A terrible picture that was in the posession of Bob Chism.
Pebbleford, Ekron, KY

I have seen these photgraphs and many more of the Ekron distillery. In the 1950's Schenley did a photographic study of the town and I donated duplicate photographs from that collection to the Filson. It is an interesting collection of photographs showing Main Street and all of the secondary streets of the town, along with the distillery photgraphs and ariel photgraphs. There are also photographs of a warehouse after a wind storm blew down the side of a warehouse showing the barrels still sitting in their ricks.

I don't recall much of the pre-Schenley history of this distillery. I am not sure that I ever heard of them making rum there. I did know they made brandy there at one time. It is interesting that I cateloged a diary from the mid 1800's here at the Filson. It was mostly about a flatboat trip down the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers, but towards the end, another generation used it to keep his journal, and he discusses starting a brandy distillery in that same general area. I always wondered if that was the start of distilling at the Ekron distillery.

Chuck,
It depends upon how you define "signifacant". All distilleries were making alcohol for the government and most of them were shipping their distillate to a distillery that was capable of distilling it to the high proof needed to make GNS. I don't think they were capable of making the GNS themselves, but Schenley did patent and then made available to all distilleries at no patent cost, an attachment to the column still that did allow distilleries to make GNS. I would say they probably sent the whiskey to Bernheim, or one of the other Louisville Distilleries that had the capability for redistillation. Fort Knox was not as important as "Rubbertown" in Southwest Jefferson County as a final destination for alcohol during the war. Schenley did not purchase this distillery until 1946, so it could have been sending to any number of the bigger distilleries in Louisville.

We've discussed before some of the war profiteering that went on in the industrial alcohol business during WWII. Evidence suggests that the little distillery group of which Bomberger/Michter's was a part was informally affiliated with Schenley then, even though it was at the time nominally independent. I wonder if Ekron had a similar relationship.

That's good information about where the alcohol was going. I imagine some of it was going to the big munitions plant across the river too.

I can add a few things to this, although I'm not sure they'll do much for clarifying this brand and its history.
We have a bottle of "DAM SITE" (no "n", mind you; this refers to a place where the river is blocked).
Hunner-proof, six-year-old straight Kentucky bourbon, bottled-in-bond in the spring of 1952.

To the best of my knowledge, there was no finer bourbon to be found in Wilder, Newport, nor throughout all of Campbell County...

Or at least the part of it that was occupied by the Pebbleford Distillery in 1946. That's when this bourbon was made, and that's who made it. Good ol' RD#34. However, by the time this fine elixir made its way into Dam Site bottles it was living in Anderson County where it was bottled by the King's Mill bonded warehouse (IRBW #35). Now, flowing through Anderson County, we find the lovely Dix River, near whose banks once stood the King's Mill Distillery -- back in the late 1800s. The River Dix eventually empties into the Kentucky River, but not before creating Herrington Lake, a reservoir formed by the Harrodsburg Dam. Inspiration, I suspect, for the name "Dam Site" on the whiskey.

It's almost certain that the "King's Mill Distillery" was related in name only to the one that ceased operations there around 1907. The one bottling Dam Site whiskey in 1952 may have been owned by Schenley, who would have also bought (and probably closed) the Pebbleford Distillery in Wilder (Newport) shortly after (or maybe even before) this whiskey was made in 1946.

Then again, maybe not. Read on...

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... in this case that would be the Ekron Ranch, there appears to have been ANOTHER Pebbleford Distillery. Which Schenley ALSO bought two years later (thanks again, Mike, for the wonderful timelines!). Mike doesn't say whether those two sites had been operated by the same distiller before Schenley bought them, but it seems likely, given the short time between purchases. Fortune Brands operates a Jim Beam Distillery in Clermont and another in Boston (KY), each called simply "Jim Beam". It does seem strange, though, that since Schenley owned the Ekron plant (which Philip's pictures show was certainly large enough to have had its own bottling operation) they didn't ship the Newport Pebbleford product there instead of to a third site. Perhaps the pre-Schenley owners of Pebbleford had already sold and delivered that product to the King's Mills facility before Schenley's purchase?

But WAIT!!! Speaking (as I did a couple sentences ago) of Jim Beam... THERE'S MORE!!!!!Philip wondered whether the Pebbleford name referred back to some earlier distiller. While I couldn't come up with a early distillery owner named Pebbleford, I've learned that the Pebbleford brand itself has some pretty impressive bloodlines.

In addition to the photos of our collection's proud representative of Northern Kentucky's distilling prowess, there is another y'all might be interested in. Among the stuff cluttering our little basement whiskey warehouse is a brochure, the subject of which is "the new Bardstown Distillery", which was the replacement for the original T. W. Samuels Distillery in Deatsville, about halfway between Bardstown and the Clermont Jim Beam plant. But the Clermont distillery wasn't the original Beam distillery. According to the late Sam Cecil's exhaustive and indispensable (if somewhat difficult-to-navigate) volume of Kentucky whiskeyana, the Deatsville location had also been the site of David M. Beam's first Nelson County distillery, and later the Beam and Hart Distillery and the Clear Springs Distillery, from which Jim Beam (himself, that is; the real one) produced three brands: "Old Tub", "Clear Springs", and (ta-dada-daahhhh!) "Pebbleford".

So, this brochure we have, from about 1934, which introduces the brand spanking new Bardstown Distillery as if it were just about to open, mentions several times that it is the home of Pebble-Ford [sic] bourbon, apparently because that brand (and not Old Tub or Clear Springs) enjoyed "a high international repute" as of the early thirties. For all that, the Bardstown Distillery didn't offer Pebbleford (or Pebble-Ford) as a brand -- their brands were Old Anthem, Bourbon Springs, and Bardstown. The brochure is also carefully-worded to avoid saying that there was any of the old Pebble-Ford whiskey still left in the warehouses -- only that they once were. Cecil notes that one Walter Brown of Chicago acquired the Clear Springs brand, and that the brands he was selling in the thirties also included "Pebbleford", but he doesn't mention any more about it.

It would be interesting to know if there were any connection between this Pebbleford and the whiskey made in Newport/Wilder and bottled in Anderson County. Did the King's Mills Distillery also end up with the Nelson County Pebbleford? There is a certain "corporate standard" appearance to Schenley labels that tend to identify them, and which are not present in the Dam Site labels, and that makes me think that this whiskey wasn't bottled by Schenley. But, then, by whom? Who operated the distillery (or at least the bottling line and bonded warehouse) known as King's Mills in the early 1950s?

Hey, thanks Philip, for bringing all this up in the first place!

Attachments

Back label of Dam Site Bourbon bottle

Pebbleford_backlabel.jpg (76.92 KiB) Viewed 41384 times

Front of bottle. Note that the design would allow any distillery's name to be easily inserted in the white box

Pebbleford_DamSite.jpg (115.03 KiB) Viewed 41375 times

This postcard is from right around the time the whiskey was made.

DixDam.jpg (146.04 KiB) Viewed 41355 times

I love the part about there being an "electric generating plant", so there's "no danger of infection".

BardstownDistillery.jpg (125.04 KiB) Viewed 41322 times

Yes, I did choose red and black for the text colors. I'm waiting for someone who doesn't already know to ask why :-)

Very interesting. I love those "washed- or faded-style" colour photos from the 1930's-1940's. I remember when in school in around 1960 seeing them in books and thinking they had an old-fashioned look even then.